Twitter Business

Generally B2B marketers find themselves in fix while promoting their business through social media channels. Sometimes they reject some channels altogether, for instance Twitter, which they feel may not bring results for them. Or generally they tend to favour LinkedIn more, which they feel since it is made for the professionals, is better suited for B2B marketing. While they are right as far as utility of LinkedIn is concerned for B2B marketing but to assume Twitter will not be beneficial to them is wrong. There are 288,000 CEOs and 366,000 start-up founders alone on Twitter as per Twitter for Executives, 2015 report! So definitely it makes sense to invest in Twitter for business. And Twitter Business marketing is fast gaining grounds in B2B space.

We will discuss few Twitter for business tips in this article which will help boost your marketing on it.

1.) Mobile Friendly Content

Consumer of internet on smartphones and tablets is increasing with passing day. The business users are increasingly looking towards their mobile devices to get their work done. Whether be it their emails, presentations, research etc. Following numbers by eMarketer is a proof enough how mobile devices are increasing becoming important for B2B buyers:

B2B Buyer Data by eMarketer

Even Google is favouring the mobile-first approach as one of the latest best practices to draw the users to your websites. So invest in content like research based visuals, charts, infographics, interactive visual quizzes, videos etc. and share that on Twitter and other social media channels where you are active, which can be consumed easily by the B2B buyers on their mobile devices rather sharing links to long PDF reports, whitepapers, ebooks etc. which people tend to find time consuming as well as tough to read on their mobile devices.

Militello Capital educating B2B Buyers with 26 different investment schemes in a single Infographic!

So be succinct, and to-the-point with actionable and useful in your visuals. For example, Militello Capital, an investment management company (now you may think such an industry cannot come with some creativity!) created this amazing infographic to educate its business customers in different investment schemes. Now imagine reading details about same information on a whitepaper or an ebook, you will easily get bored!

2.) Focus on Value

B2B buyers are less interested in the product specifics and more interested in knowing the value that product can provide them. This is proved by following research wherein 92% of the B2B buyers said that they are more interested in the value rather than the specifics of the product!This overwhelming response shows that in your tweets regarding from products or services, you should emphasise on the benefits and value which your potential B2B customers can get out of it. For example, in the following tweet by Cisco Security (a B2B firm), they are selling their service but at the same time are promoting it in terms of value (security of your internet linked devices):

Free Digital Marketing Webinar

Date: 21st Mar, 2018 (Wed)Time: 3 PM to 4:30 PM (IST/GMT +5:30)

3.) Do Live Tweets

There are lots of events, trade shows, product launches etc., happening across all the brands and industries. Plan out and create multiple tweets in advance to create pre, during and after event buzz. Tweet, asking people to come over to your events and share benefits they can achieve by visiting you stalls or events. Tweet about your business and the activities which you are undertaking along with the pictures and videos of the event. This way you will be better able to engage your audience (i.e. B2B Buyers) not just online on Twitter but also offline during the events. You can also announce some cool giveaways if the participants during the events tweet about your business which again encourages visits to your stalls as well as engagement online. For example, lot of B2B buzz happened during #AdTechIndia event, which you see for yourself here.

4.) Use Twitter Ads

Apart from the organic outreach, Twitter Ads is a useful platform to increase your reach among B2B Buyers. Twitter offers tools to reach out to the right audience using its native ads platform. The detailed information on how to run Twitter Ads can be read here.

This is a direct way any brand can use to generate leads through Twitter. For example, here is one promoted Tweet by Capgemini, targeting the automotive industry with its IT services:

Promoted Tweet by Capgemini

5.) Guide Your Customers

Decision making in B2B market is slow and time-consuming. So you cannot expect that your 1 or 2 tweets here or there are enough for someone to make a decision to purchase your product or service. You have to guide. the customers through the entire sales funnel. For example, New Relic (a digital intelligence company), drives its customers through the sales funnel in following way:

How New Relic Guides Its Customers on Twitter (example taken from Twitter’s ebook)

Not just this process of guiding, but also it is important that B2B buyers whom you want to reach out to, should be exposed to your messages multiple times. As per Twitter Internal B2B Campaigns Report 2015, “someone who has seen a business’s message four times is 335% more likely* to click on a link in a Tweet by that business than someone who has only been exposed to the message once“.

Free Digital Marketing Webinar

Date: 21st Mar, 2018 (Wed)Time: 3 PM to 4:30 PM (IST/GMT +5:30)

6.) Share Exclusive Videos

Although I have already mentioned the value of rich media content like videos in the point 1 already, but I wanted to mention this part separately that exclusive videos can be shared on Twitter, like live video streaming using Twitter’s Periscope app.

This is an excellent way to provide a peek into your business world to your potential customers. You should use this feature during your events, conferences, product launches etc. That way, this also adds a human touch to your messages that there are real human beings working behind the social media updates.

7.) Bonus Tips

I have written another article regarding tips to boost the Twitter reach, many of which can be applied as-it-is in the B2B context too. Please have a look at those tips too and apply whichever you feel can bring in results for you. Remember, in digital marketing, it is all about experimenting quickly and learning quickly and finalising

Twitter Business Page

I have added this section so that just in case you want to learn how to create business page on Twitter, then here is a detailed post with step-by-step instructions covering almost all the areas of setting up a Twitter business page. If you haven’t created it yet, you must create a Twitter business page today! Believe me, you won’t go wrong.

Conclusion

I hope you found this article to be useful and practical enough, with Twitter for business tips which you can apply to your B2B efforts. How are your using Twitter for business? Let me know your thoughts regarding the same in the comments section below. Have a great time doing B2B marketing on Twitter!

Harman has executed a wide variety of Digital Marketing campaigns across different companies and marketing agencies in the last 8 years. After working full-time with different organizations, he is currently working as a freelance digital marketing consultant. His interests include reading books and taking a walk amidst greenery.